Meet Jake Junda and Emily Schroeter of Two Roaming Souls in Remote

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jake Junda and Emily Schroeter.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Jake and Emily. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Jake and Emily both moved to Vail, Colorado after college to pursue their passion for skiing/snowboarding. It was there that we met working at the same restaurant. We quickly fell in love with the mountain lifestyle and also each other. During the off-seasons, we would go on extended camping trips throughout Colorado and Utah. Those experiences of camping, hiking, and backpacking grew our love for travel and adventure.

But looking to jumpstart our professional careers, we moved to Denver to find jobs that aligned with our college degrees. We moved into a fancy new apartment in Edgewater and began furnishing it to make it feel like home. With a life that now felt more traditional and new career prospects, the outlook would appear bright.

But for some reason, we didn’t feel that way. So that’s when we decided to start our outdoor travel blog, Two Roaming Souls. The blog gave us a platform to build a business that was centered around our passions. So when we weren’t able to be outdoors, we could at least keep our flame lit by writing about it. We shortly realized that while the fancy apartment and 9-5 jobs were nice, they didn’t afford us the time and money to achieve our real goals. We missed having the freedom to travel and explore the outdoors.

Then, seemingly at the same time, we both got interested in Vanlife. We both recognized it as a solution to our problem. We knew that a campervan would be the perfect adventure-mobile. And with the money we would save on rent, we knew that it would afford us the freedom we were looking for. So over the next year, we pulled a complete 180. We started selling off the furnishings we had bought for our new apartment and getting rid of anything that couldn’t fit into the van. We started saving every dollar towards our upcoming van conversion. And we did hundreds of hours of research on what van to buy and how to convert it into a tiny home on wheels. We were prepared to go for broke making this dream a reality.

In April 2019, we started converting our very own campervan, Delphie. We took it from a bare metal shell to a fully equipped apartment on wheels with all the comforts of a home, like lights, stove, refrigeration, running water, and toilet. Of course, it cost us nearly all the money we had and was a scary leap of faith. But we were happy to make this bet on ourselves. Our campervan, Delphie, allowed us to dive headfirst into our outdoor travel blog lifestyle. Vanlife gave us a way to experience so much more and provide the first-hand experience to our readers. 

After over eight months of living in our van full-time, we absolutely love it! It has allowed us to exponentially grow our business and we hope Two Roaming Souls will one day be our full-time job. But until then, we will keep fueling our travels with seasonal or service/hospitality jobs. Meanwhile, using any free time for traveling, exploring, and creating new content for the blog.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like many, we were sold the dream of becoming full-time bloggers. We saw that it was possible to make money with blogging and were excited that our passion could also be our job. (read: we are not in this to become rich)

We didn’t expect success to come overnight, but even after several months and hundreds of hours of writing posts, editing photos, and learning SEO, we weren’t growing as fast as we hoped. Our following was growing, but it wasn’t translating into financial growth.

The niche we cultivated for our blog is budget outdoor travel. This poses a challenge to growing the profitability of our blog because we are often teaching people how to save money rather than spend it frivolously. And while we have been finding more opportunities to work with other brands and companies, it’s hard to build partnerships that benefit us and also our readers. We are cautious not to “sell-out” and stay authentic to our brand and ourselves.

Another challenge is all the minor things that accompany living in a van full-time. For example, not having a permanent address, living with a finite supply of water and electricity, experiencing hot or cold weather more profoundly. But these are problems that we are happy to face.

Jake always says, “you can never get rid of all your problems, you can only trade them for different problems.” So life is really about finding what set of challenges you are happy to deal with. But living vanlife has changed the way we view our problems/struggles. We are much more willing to get out of our comfort zone and face our challenges head-on. We see that giving up is the only way to truly fail.

Two Roaming Souls – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Our website, Two Roaming Souls, is a travel blog that is based on budget outdoor travel. We write most about hiking, camping, van life, and backpacking. Our blog posts are meant to be fun, informational, and inclusive. Our mission is to empower others to find their adventure. We demonstrate that you don’t need special skills or lots of money to have amazing experiences.

We are most proud of the fact that we built our website from nothing and stayed true to ourselves. Together we have created something better than what we could have achieved individually. What sets us apart? We have grown a deep commitment for cleaning up trash in the places we visit. On the homepage of our website, we have a counter that keeps track of the trash we have collected during our travels. We spend lots of time enjoying public lands and want to do our part to leave it better than we found it. And using our platform, we hope to teach others how to do the same through education of “Leave No Trace” ethics.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
We strive to be as authentic and transparent as possible. To achieve our goal of helping others, it’s imperative that we connect with our readers and followers on a personal level. When we make personal connections and are actively inclusive, it helps to bring people into our community and experience the world the way we do.

Contact Info:

• Website: tworoamingsouls.com
• Email: tworoamingsouls@gmail.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/tworoamingsouls
• Facebook: facebook.com/tworoamingsouls
• Twitter: twitter.com/tworoamingsouls
• Other: pinterest.com/tworoamingsouls —- youtube.com/channel/UC0MiZd3gq_hOj7bdT_4V3Q

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